The nearest case to deliberate invention of deities was, perhaps, the promulgation as objects of worship in primitive times of such abstractions as Hope (Spes), Fear (Pallor), Concord (Concordia), Courage (Virtus), etc. How far these gods were gods, however, in even the ordinary heathen sense of the word, is doubtful. In any case, they were but the extension of an old and existent principle—the personification of divine aspects or qualities; they added no more to what went before than a new Saint or Virgin of Loretto does to the Catholic Church.
"It was a favorite opinion with the Christian apologists, Eusebius and others," says Gladstone, "that the pagan deities represented deified men. Others consider them to signify the powers of external nature personified. For others they are, in many cases, impersonations of human passions and propensities, reflected back from the mind of man. A fourth mode of interpretation would treat them as copies, distorted and depraved, of a primitive system of religion given by God to man. The Apostle St. Paul speaks of them as devils; by which he may perhaps intend to convey that, under the names and in connection with the worship of those deities, the worst influences of the Evil One were at work. This would rather be a subjective than an objective description; and would rather convey an account of the practical working of a corrupted religion, than an explanation of its origin or its early course. As between the other four, it seems probable that they all, in various degrees and manners, entered into the composition of the later paganism, and also of the Homeric or Olympian system. That system, however, was profoundly adverse to mere Nature-worship; while the care of departments or provinces of external nature were assigned to its leading personages. Such worship of natural objects or elemental powers, as prevailed in connection with it, was in general local or secondary. And the deification of heroes in the age of Homer was rare and merely titular. We do not find that any cult or system of devotion was attached to it."
So humanly divine, so impotently great are the gods of Homer; so thoroughly invested with the passions of men, clothed in distinctive shades of human character; such mingled virtue and vice, love and hate, courage and cowardice; animal passions uniting with noble sentiments; base and vulgar thoughts with lofty and sublime ideas; and all so wrought up by his inimitable fancy into divine and supernatural beings, as to work most powerfully upon the nature of the people.
These concrete conceptions of his deities have ever been a source of consolation to the savage; for, by thus bringing down the gods to a nearer level with himself, they could be more materially propitiated, and their protection purchased with gifts and sacrifices. Thus the Greeks could obtain advice through oracles, the Hindoo could pass at once into eternal joys by throwing himself under the car of Juggernaut, while the latter-day offender seeks in the assistance of the departed to buy forgiveness with charities, and to compound crime by building churches.
UNRECORDED FACTS SOON BECOME MYTHOLOGICAL.
The difficulty is, that in attempting to establish any theory concerning the origin of things, the soundest logic is little else than wild speculation. Mankind progress unconsciously. We know not what problems we ourselves are working out for those who come after us; we know not by what process we arrive at many of our conclusions; much of that which is clear to ourselves is never understood by our neighbor, and never will be even known by our posterity. Events the most material are soon forgotten, or else are made spiritual and preserved as myths. Blot out the process by which science arrived at results, and in every achievement of science, in the steam engine, the electric telegraph, we should soon have a heaven-descended agency, a god for every machine. Where mythology ceases and history begins, is in the annals of every nation a matter of dispute. What at first appears to be wholly fabulous may contain some truth, whereas much of what is held to be true is mere fable, and herein excessive skepticism is as unwise as excessive credulity.
Historical facts, if unrecorded, are soon lost. Thus when Juan de Oñate penetrated New Mexico in 1596, Fray Marco de Niza, and the expedition of Coronado in 1540, appear to have been entirely forgotten by the Cibolans. Fathers Crespi and Junípero Serra, in their overland explorations of 1769, preparatory to the establishment of a line of Missions along the Californian seaboard, could find no traces, in the minds of the natives, of Cabrillo's voyage in 1542, or of the landing of Sir Francis Drake in 1579; although, so impressed were the savages in the latter instance, that, according to the worthy chaplain of the expedition, they desired "with submission and fear to worship us as gods." Nor can we think civilized memories—which ascribe the plays of Shakespeare to Bacon, and parcel out the Iliad of Homer among numberless unrecorded verse-makers—more tenacious. Frederick Augustus Wolf denies that a Homer ever existed; or, if he did, that he ever wrote his poem, as writing was at that time not generally known; but he claims that snatches of history, descending orally from one generation to another, in the end coalesced into the matchless Iliad and Odyssey. The event which so strongly impressed the father, becomes vague in the mind of the son, and in the third generation is either lost or becomes legendary. Incidents of recent occurrence, contemporary perhaps with the narration, are sometimes so misinterpreted by ignorance or distorted by prejudice, as to place the fact strangely at variance with the recital. Yet no incident nor action falls purposeless to the ground. Unrecorded it may be, unwitnessed, unheard by beings material; a thought-wave even, lost in space invisible, acting, for aught we know, only upon the author; yet so acting, it casts an influence, stamps on fleeting time its record, thereby fulfilling its destiny. Thus linger vapory conceits long after the action which created them has sunk into oblivion; undefined shadows of substance departed; none the less impressive because mingled with immortal imagery.
Turn now from outward events to inner life; from events grown shadowy with time, to life ever dim and mysterious alike to savage and sage. Everywhere man beholds much that is incomprehensible; within, around, the past, the future. Invisible forces are at work, invisible agencies play upon his destiny. And in the creations of fancy, which of necessity grow out of the influence of nature upon the imagination, it is not strange that mysteries darken, facts and fancies blend; the past and the future uniting in a supernatural present.
We are never content with positive knowledge. From the earliest workings of the mind, creations of fancy play as important a part in ethical economy as positive perceptions. Nor does culture in any wise lessen these fanciful creations of the intellect. In the political arena of civilized nations, wars and revolutions for the enforcement of opinion concerning matters beyond the reach of positive knowledge, have equaled if they have not exceeded wars for empire or ascendancy. In the social and individual affairs of life we are governed more by the ideal than by the real. On reaching the limits of positive knowledge, reason pauses, but fancy overleaps the boundary, and wanders forward in an endless waste of speculation.
RELIGIOUS AND SCIENTIFIC ULTIMATES.